Why I'm almost ready to give up . . .

Because plain, ordinary, simple truth is irrelevant to our political discourse. As Atrios points out, in the Republican "debate" last night the Mittster claimed that the U.S. had no choice but to invade Iraq because Saddam would not admit the UN weapons inspectors. Will anyone in the corporate media, reporter or pundit, bother to point out that the major flaw in this argument is that it is literally false, as in, does not correspond to reality, is made up, is a LIE?

But of course, the Emperor of Mesopotamia has made the same assertion on at least four occasions. I recommend, for those of you who can take it, this attempt to build a comprehensive catalog of the lies of the Bush administration, although the proprietors concede the task is beyond human capacity.

If the news media simply bothered to point out what is true and what is false when politicians speak, we would live in a completely different country. It's that simple. It really is. We live in a gigantic nuthouse, where truth doesn't matter. Large percentages of the public have a whole lot of very important beliefs that are objectively false, which is not surprising since politicians and pundits and even "reporters" tell them these lies every day. It so happens that the so-called "conservative" movement and the Republican party depend entirely on this infrastructure of falsehood for their very existence.

We don't have a divide in this country between political factions with different priorities, values, or intellectually defensible arguments for how to achieve the general welfare or pursue widely held goals. We have a divide between the party of reality and the party of delusion. It really is that simple. Some beliefs are just wrong. But our public discourse does not acnkowledge the fundamental concept of reality.